Nexsan Technologies — Green Storage

The response to our announcement last week of the first members of our new E-Series storage family has been truly amazing.  In Part 1 of this series, I told you a bit about our design philosophy, so today I’d like to introduce you to the technology and some of our newest innovations.

The first thing that people notice is our new Active Drawer™ technology.  It’s something our engineers started working on over five years ago, as part of our quest to deliver higher and higher density without the sorts of painful compromises that had afflicted our competitors’ earlier efforts.  When we announced a chassis in 2002 that packed a whopping 42 disks in 4U, it was a game-changer.  As time marched on, however, it became clear that 60 drives in 4U was the next milestone, but we just didn’t like the idea of having to slide a honkin’ big 300 pound chassis three feet out of a rack to change a drive (a process likely to involve at least two people, a stepladder, gigantic metal barn doors, and quite possibly an ambulance).  There had to be a better way.

There were a few vendors that tried to improve density by creating disk packs that could plug into a shelf, but all the drives in a pack had to be taken off-line in order to change just one of them, necessitating a huge RAID rebuild once the pack was re-inserted.  Rumor has it that at least one of them attempted to speed up the rebuild by scoreboarding changed stripes, but I guess for whatever reason they gave up on that approach.   Another problem with this approach is that in order for the canisters to be safely handled by one person, they could only carry a relative handful of drives, which means that a lot of them would be needed to build a 60 drive unit, increasing costs and reducing reliability.

After years of development and experimentation, we settled on a drawer system, with three drawers each with 20 drives, each drawer permanently connected by a redundant pair of custom power and data cables that slide in and out as the drawer moves.   We call it Active Drawer because our system is able to sustain I/O to any of the drives in a drawer, even when the drawer has been pulled out to add or change drives.   This means that the other drives are not impacted during a maintenance process.

It is a common  misconception that the goal of high density is to reduce rack space requirements.  That’s nice, of course, but it’s not the reason we create these amazing designs.  Rather, the real win from high density is in the reduction of components and complexity required to implement any given amount of storage.  Less parts means greater reliability and lower power; less complexity means fewer installation headaches and quite possibly a big win in long term reliability as well.  And it’s usually cheaper.

In the spirit of “no-compromise”, we wanted to ensure that the design could accommodate even the most power hungry 15K SAS drives, while at the same time being an economical solution for SATA drives and a worthy home for ultra-high IOPS SSD drives.  This was partly an electro-mechanical challenge, necessitating state of the art power, cooling, and vibration-control technologies, but also we needed a major jump in RAID controller technology.

Our latest RAID controller design is the beating heart of the new E-Series products.  It’s much faster of course, but amazingly it uses less power and is half the size of our previous generation.  Much of the improvement is due to our transition to PCI-Express Gen2, but also we completely re-designed our custom hardware RAID engine, and moved to a new generation of support silicon.  We also went to a dual core CPU, but unlike many of our competitors who need gigantic, power-hungry, processors to do their RAID calculations as software subroutines (RAID 6 or other multi-parity schemes in particular are huge power pigs when you do it in code), we took the time to create a custom-designed hardware RAID card with a custom-designed RAID chip that does all the heavy lifting, so our processor is relatively lightly loaded.

Another cool thing about our new controller design is that we put the host I/O on pluggable cards.  This week we announced our dual 8 Gbit Fibre Channel I/O card, but others are coming right behind it including dual 10 GbE iSCSI, and a dual SAS card (the latter for DAS applications which are surprisingly common among our customer base).  We plan to let moderately tech-savvy customers change the cards themselves if their interface needs change, or we can swap it various other ways.

There’s a lot to love about our new E-Series family.  We can pack 1200 TB into a single rack, using field-proven enterprise-grade 2TB SATA drives (1800 TB when the 3 TB enterprise-grade drives come out in a quarter or two), or if SSD is more your thing we can deliver about 1,000,000 truly random IOPS in the same space.  For archival applications, or applications that have periods of downtime like D2D, we have added an even deeper level of power savings called AutoMAID® Level 4 that can reduce the power consumption of this 1.2 petabyte rack of storage to about 2 KW compared to alternative vendor solutions which consume as much as 20 KW for the same capacity.

The first three members of the E-Series family are the NEXSAN E18, which holds 18 SAS or SSD drives in only 2U (these are 3.5” form factor drives, mind you, so this is very dense indeed), the NEXSAN E60, which holds 60 drives in only 4U, and the NEXSAN E60X which is the expansion chassis for the E60 (giving you a total of 240 TB in 8U including redundant RAID controllers and power supplies).  In the next blog post in this series I’ll tell you more about how our E-Series drives efficiency to a new level.

Sometimes I feel like Steve Jobs – just when some of my competitors have caught up with some of our specs and copied our features, we release something new that leapfrogs ahead and sets the new standard.  Take a stroll over to our newly-updated website and have a look – we have videos, white papers, and all sorts of new stuff.  We’ve invested heavily into the web infrastructure to make our site much more dynamic and useful, so let us know how we can help you.

Today Nexsan introduced its most advanced storage family yet – the revolutionary NEXSAN E-Series.  We will get into the feeds and speeds in Part 2 of this blog post, but first I think it would be useful to explain the strategic thinking behind the new family.

We have watched with a mixture of amusement and incredulity as the “big iron” vendors try to reposition their high-end offerings as being optimized for the mid-market, while at the same time the commodity vendors in the market are saying that because they have more “tick boxes” than before, that they should be seen as serious competition in the midsize storage arena.  Either way, the fundamental error is the same.   The mid-market has its own set of challenges, and the only way to address them is from day one of the engineering project, focus like a laser on what the mid-market really needs.

Nexsan has been focused on the mid-market for over a decade, and we have observed how much pain these folks have encountered when trying to adapt their business to the costs and complexities of a high-touch enterprise storage solution, or dealing with the blind panic resulting from reliance on the “black hole” tech support one encounters with products from commodity vendors.

A mid-market customer cannot often afford to add storage specialists to their IT department and also send them to weeks-long vendor training, nor can they afford the armies of Professional Services consultants that are often recommended by the Enterprise vendors as an alternative.  Especially when you consider that these vendors usually want a huge annual spend on maintenance and of course a forklift upgrade after Year 2.

A well-crafted storage solution for the mid-market must be designed around an IT department that has few if any dedicated storage managers, and thus must have an installation and management process that’s virtually free of arcane industry jargon.  With shrinking budgets these days, it’s entirely possible that the IT Manager will be racking the gear himself (or herself) as well as configuring it and perhaps even maintaining it (to avoid the annual tithe to the vendor).  Creating a storage product that fits these needs cannot be a simple afterthought.

In the next installment of this blog post I’ll tell you about the new products we are announcing today, and why we think they will set the new standard for mid-market storage.

With growing capacity needs, shorter backup windows and escalating energy costs coupled with shrinking datacenter space, tighter budgets and the need for faster restores, IT professionals are demanding a new kind of deduplication solution. It’s not just about saving storage anymore. It’s about saving time, energy, space and resources – a more holistic approach to storage efficiency.

An efficient data center should be more than a data center that conserves energy costs. The efficient data center is one that has been optimized to reduce overall data while delivering power efficiency, space efficiency and cost efficiency. By combining all these benefits together, this new data center can provide storage optimization that truly delivers bottom-line value. 

The cost of traditional storage solutions makes it difficult for organizations to efficiently backup and store their rapidly growing business and application data. Compounding this challenge are tight budgets which drive an increased demand for solutions that will improve operating efficiencies while meeting performance requirements. 

So why is it so hard to achieve both? 

It shouldn’t be. Especially for storage deduplication systems which are primarily used as backup targets. The typical backup window is less than eight hours a day. Yet, most deduplication systems spin drives and burn energy for the remaining 16 hours of operation. 

Would you leave your car running at full speed in the driveway when not using it? Probably not. So why would you keep your storage running at full speed between back-up windows? Not only is it wasting power to operate, but it’s wasting power to cool as well. 

By automatically reducing power consumption of the backup system when it’s not in use, companies can realize immediate savings – without giving up performance. They get “Speed with Green” (SG). And by combining this with data reduction through high-speed deduplication, footprint reduction by utilizing space-efficient storage arrays, all in a cost-efficient, integrated solution, the efficient data center shouldn’t be hard to achieve. Rather, the question should be why settle for anything less? 

Nexsan and FalconStor don’t think anyone should have to. That’s why we have paired up to deliver a single, high-performance, power-efficient solution that packs data deduplication features into a high-density solution that intelligently and automatically lowers its power consumption when not in use. With the Nexsan DeDupe SG, any company can get “Speed with Green” for a truly efficient data center without giving up a thing.

The discussion of value has stimulated a lot of reaction. I recently had an interesting discussion regarding value as a concept that users need to relearn.

Over time, users have wrongly become convinced that they need a different storage system for different types of applications. But with top quality and high-end functionality now found across all tiers of storage, why do users need to purchase a different system for different uses? The answer is: they don’t.

Just because some storage vendors push this specialized approach doesn’t mean that users should or need to accept it.

Most of us don’t do this with our family transportation. Most families don’t need to purchase a separate car for grocery shopping, going to work and taking the kids to school. Most cars provide high enough quality, performance and functionality to provide fast, safe transportation to shop, work and care for children. 

Why can’t storage be the same?

Sure, there are a few exceptions, but most organizations can store most or all of their data and applications on one type of storage system that is easy to use, affordable and enterprise-class.

Approaching storage this way has tremendous value to an organization. It reduces acquisition, integration, and management costs, and it dramatically reduces complexity! That broadens the meaning of the term value beyond just a financial term.

What business would not be better enabled, more competitive and better positioned to survive and grow out of this economic situation thanks to a storage product that is good enough to serve most or all of their data and applications? 

Users have grown accustomed to buying different storage systems for different applications, yet this incorrect practice has created far too much complexity. For deep-pocketed organizations with the luxury of purchasing different storage systems for different data and applications, that’s great, but for the vast majority of organizations, why not challenge this old way of thinking by purchasing single storage systems that can serve most of your data and applications?

At Nexsan, we believe in top quality and high-end functionality for all storage systems at a price any organization can afford. Functional value with financial value. And in times like this, isn’t that what you need all of your technology suppliers to do? 

Things have changed, and along the way something has happen to the meaning of value.

Back in the day, value meant you got a lot for your money. More bang for the buck, so to speak. Value was never supposed to mean merely low price. Just because something is low-priced, doesn’t mean it’s a good value.

In the current economic climate, many customers are looking for straightforward low prices, and that’s fine and at times probably appropriate. But almost any vendor in any market can play the low-price game and meet the needs of such customers. However, what customers should be focusing on and what our economy really needs are products that deliver high functional value – that is, products that enable you do more things or get more done while also providing you a fair price.

Some storage vendors are now pushing a low cost message and paying no attention to extending their financial value proposition by simultaneously adding a new level of functional value for users. Price alone has rarely proven a sustainable strategy.

What business would not be better enabled, made more competitive, positioned to survive and grow out of this economic situation by products that deliver both greater functional and financial value? Products that deliver true value are ideally suited for a wide range of crucial and current applications, and getting more done with less or the same resources is a refrain we hear time and time again in meetings with CIOs and other executives.

The combination of true function-value and financial-value is rare today. Such solutions are frequently marketed but rarely delivered. Users have grown accustomed to buying a low priced/low function product or a high priced/highly functional product for different storage needs. But our current economic climate with its resulting tighter IT budgets demands a return to the old-school flavor of value. Honest value in which you feel good about what you bought; a product that has the flexibility to address a wide range of standard daily tasks but also offers manageability, scalability, and a price that doesn’t make you wince.

Value does not mean settling for a low price, feature-less or low quality product as a result!

We believe in real value at Nexsan, and right now, isn’t that what we need now more than ever?

Green is good, but don’t be fooled, especially in this economy. All green technologies are not equal and very few IT departments are buying green technologies simply for the environment’s sake. Today’s successful green products, first and foremost, enable significant cost savings. And as more and more IT departments make do with fewer resources, these cost-saving green solutions must also meet multiple business needs without compromising performance. SASBeast, the newest addition to our value-based product family, meets several big needs in one small package and it enables energy savings of up to 60% without impacting performance.

Most MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) solutions save energy by turning off drives so they are no longer spinning and consuming energy. That’s fine, but these basic MAID solutions are better suited for Tier 3 or Tier 4 applications, like backup or deep archive, where you can wait several seconds or even minutes for idle drives to wake up and climb to full speed. But these non-spinning drives can’t respond quickly enough for file servers or databases that are online 24×7. Subsequently, customers are left without any cost-reducing MAID for high-performance Tier 1 and Tier 2 applications. 

We’re once again changing the rules! SASBeast is a storage system designed specifically for high-speed Tier 1 and Tier 2 applications, yet it uses MAID. But we’re not talking about plain vanilla MAID, this is our unique AutoMAID™. So how can you save energy and reduce costs with AutoMAID while still remaining responsive for Tier 1 and Tier 2 applications like fileservers and databases?

AutoMAID is significantly more advanced than the basic “on/off” MAID that is found in other products. With AutoMAID, customers don’t have to turn off the SASBeast drives to save energy. They can start by automatically parking the SAS drive heads after a user-defined period of inactivity. The drives keep spinning at full speed, but the energy needed to keep the heads in position is saved, reducing energy costs by as much as 20%. With AutoMAID, drives remain highly responsive, quickly able to read or write data in under a second and will remain highly responsive until I/O requests have stopped for a user-defined period of time. Furthermore, customers still have the option to automatically stop individual drives altogether if they are not used for an even longer period of time. This can reduce energy costs even further, up to 60%. 

So now you have a “new rule” for MAID: Nexsan green with speed!  It comes baked into the architecture of our high-performance and energy-saving Nexsan SASBeast with AutoMAID. Designed to save energy and reduce costs on any storage tier, SASBeast is ideal for Tier 1 and Tier 2 applications like fileservers and databases. Now that’s green you can take to the bank.

SAS drive technology, blazing IOPS and throughput, high transactional databases . . . and green technology. SAS drive technology + ultra green technology. It doesn’t quite sound like peanut butter and jelly does it? You wouldn’t take a race car and create a ‘green hybrid’ out of it. And why is that? Because you’re not expecting fuel mileage from a race car, you expect performance. That’s why you have it.

There is a general assumption about green technology that pervades our collective conscious – in order to reap the benefits, you must accept the limitations.

But, it’s 2009, all ready! And it’s time to change the rules. There’s ground breaking work that’s been done with the latest SAS drive technology that is changing the perceived norms about energy efficiency and SAS. With it, we’re delivering the benefits of green without the limitations. For the first time, someone is giving you speed . . . with green.

Don’t write this off!  Take a closer look. Is energy efficiency something that should be expected from SAS technology? Absolutely. Why? Because even though a SAS drive may need to go really fast when asked, there is no need to keep the drive spinning at full speed all the time, even when there are no I/O requests.

You certainly wouldn’t keep the engine of a Formula One race care running full bore even after the driver, the crew, and the fans have gone home for the night. Checkered flag drops, so do those RPMs!

As ridiculous as that might sound in the racing industry, it’s precisely what happens in the storage industry all around the world. Office demand slows or falls off completely, employees go home for the night, the weekend, holidays . . . but high performance SAS systems run at full power, full speed even when there is no demand. 

We innovated the green storage space with AutoMAID technology by delivering the high performance you expect from SAS with energy efficiency you didn’t know was possible. AutoMAID places disks in an idle state during inactivity while providing near instantaneous access to data when needed. And this is not simple spin up, spin down techniques. This is sophisticated technology that operates on an entirely different, policy-based principal. By doing so, AutoMAID uniquely delivers the benefits of green without limitations. Speed with Green.